Five Months with Vista

As I've mentioned, I'm going to be spending one day a week back in the world of IT consulting. It's got me psyched about technology again, although as a "user" I'm often frustrated by its limitations. For example, my Vista laptop has been troublesome lately.

Vista is constantly "doing stuff," downloading, updating, querying the Internet, installing, breaking itself, fixing its mistakes, and my copy, at least, is riddled with errors in the logs. The system still works, but trying to solve problems is difficult. For example, say you want to remove a program, like my buggy new copy of Bit Defender anti-virus. How do you uninstall a program? I've looked everywhere, but I can't figure out how to navigate to this feature. So I search in Help. Help, is too helpful. Rather than teaching me how to get to "Add-Remove Programs," if there is such a thing in Vista, it instead offers me a link to uninstall the program. So I click the link and learn nothing. What do I want to do if I want to uninstall another program? You guessed it, Help.

The same level of obfuscation exists in most Vista attempts at navigation. Finding a program to run usually means typing it's first few letters in the Start search. Worse, the new Office 2007 is equally confounding to use. It used to be that you were at least safe in your applications. I might sound like an old man, but Windows XP was the pinnacle of Windows based operating systems for me.

Disneyland! I'll be at Disneyland on Friday with Rocco. This is my attempt to take several small trips throughout the year instead of one big blowout one. He's staying with my parents right now while my wife is traveling in the Philippines. I called them this evening to have them measure his height, so I could figure out what rides he can go on. It actually works the other way around, there are only a handful of rides that you can be excluded from based on height, and even then a 3-year old (he'll be three on Monday) probably won't want to go on them. I was telling my mother, yeah, he's 36 inches, he can go on the Matterhorn! Ummm, no.